Renewable Energy needs a New Power Plant Model

Everyone agrees on the need to switch to renewable energy sources – away from coal, petroleum etc. For obvious reasons. But, as Rahul Matthan says, any such switch also requires a re-think and overhaul of our power grid.

 

The major problem with renewable energy, aside from cost?

“Renewable energy is notoriously fickle. All it takes for supply to be disrupted is slightly overcast skies or a subtle change in weather that becalms the winds.”

Solving that problem requires effective energy storage solutions to be established. Expecting only the power grid companies to accomplish this won’t work. And, argues Matthan, that is not that the best approach.

 

What does Matthan have in mind? For example, he says, take electric vehicles. Many of them can store more energy than they need – or maybe, after charging, it didn’t get used. A possible change here is as follows:

“We need to… install a bi-directional charging unit so that EVs recharge their batteries whenever electricity is cheap and readily available, and, when it is not, offer this stored energy as an alternate source of cheap household power.”

Notice what this approach calls for?

“Sort of intelligent energy infrastructure in our homes.”

Or even better, such an approach could/should scale “into a single decentralized storage network that (covers) entire neighbourhoods”. To sum up:

“(It is) integrating all these diverse and distributed energy sources into one unified and flexible power supply system, which, through real-time data analytics and active monitoring, will be able to efficiently aggregate available energy resources to guarantee reliable supply.”

 

Matthan calls this model a “virtual power plant” because it is decentralized:

“We will have to re-imagine what we believe a power plant ought to be. The only way we will be able to dynamically balance variable demand with intermittent supply is if we can build a system that is completely virtual from end to end.”